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As per the EU motto, we have always been ‘united in diversity’ at the Translation Centre, and we are now united in adversity. From our home offices, we have created multilingual slogans to remind everyone at the Centre – and beyond – about the basic ways of protecting oneself and others against the new coronavirus.

9 May is usually the date when EU institutions, agencies and other bodies open their doors to the public and organise festivities in many European cities to celebrate the birth of the European Union with the Schuman Declaration. Although the coronavirus pandemic has made such activities impossible this year, the EU translation services have still joined efforts to find a way to mark this important founding event.

In order to help our stakeholders and policy makers around Europe in their efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 by encouraging people to stay at home, the Translation Centre asked its language teams for their versions of the slogan ‘Stay at home, save lives!’. The results, in the 24 official EU languages plus Luxembourgish, have been used to create language-specific posters for the each of the 27 EU Member States, and for any other country that wishes to make use of them.

The Translation Centre’s top strategic priority has always been to ensure high-quality translation for its clients. The quality of a translation depends to a great extent on the quality of the source text. This crucial aspect is often overlooked by many authors, who have not necessarily been trained in professional writing. The Centre offers an editing service for source texts to enhance their linguistic quality and render them fit for translation. However, the best results are achieved when authors draft texts bearing in mind from the start that they will be translated.

270 multilingual entries related to the current pandemic are now available in IATE, the European Union terminology database. With 8 million terms in the 24 official languages, IATE is the terminology reference not only for language professionals, but also for national experts, policy advisers, public administrations, academics and private sector companies.

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), which has been one of the Translation Centre΄s clients since 1996, has launched an online survey to try to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people living in the EU.